


all this life hallowed be

by captainkilly



Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies), Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Conversations, Gellert the Seer, Legilimency, M/M, Magical Bond
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-25
Updated: 2018-07-25
Packaged: 2019-06-16 07:13:20
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,312
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15431772
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/captainkilly/pseuds/captainkilly
Summary: Gellert Grindelwald is never far from Albus Dumbledore's mind.





	all this life hallowed be

**Author's Note:**

> This marks my first HP fanfic in many, many years. First time writing for a slash ship, too, though the bond between Albus and Gellert has always fascinated me. While there are certain canon mentions in this, it mostly remains a string of conversations between two people who simply cannot let each other go..

It should not matter at this point in time. He hates that it does.

 

Albus Dumbledore stands before the mirror and shakes his head. Closes his eyes and opens them again, as though he can derive a different meaning from what he sees that way. Professor Flamel had cautioned him, had he not?

 

 _The mirror sees your deepest heart’s desire,_ the immortal had said. _For one like yourself, Albus, it may yet prove too much to bear._

 

He’d thought he would see her in it. Ariana. Perhaps see her with Aberforth, even, though Aberforth yet lives while she is already gone. It would make sense to see family, happier in a mirror’s reflection than they ever had been while together in life. Perhaps then, his heart would mend.

 

His heart feels as though it’s been torn apart anew.

 

“Not you,” he prays out loud, even though the reflection doesn’t lie. “Please. Don’t let it be you.”

 

He has not seen Gellert Grindelwald since that day. He had sensed a presence at the funeral, thrumming through the earth that had swallowed Ariana’s coffin, beating a slow and steady pace beneath his feet. Albus knows it’s the only thing that kept him standing. It had rather felt like Gellert holding him up. Keeping him on his feet. It had felt like an apology. Like a farewell. He’d leaned into it. Leaned on it until he felt steady enough to walk. He’d welcomed it.

 

The guilt had set in, after.

 

The guilt had set him to quarrel with Abe so fiercely, had it not? Abe, who rightly blamed him for Ariana. Abe, still trembling from the aftershocks of a _Cruciatus_ so fierce that it would take weeks for him to be able to hold anything steady in his hands again. Abe, who’d seen things for what they were long before Albus had opened his eyes long enough to see them.

 

 _It was that boy, Albus,_ Abe had said. _He got into your head. Changed you, somehow, the way that he always changed the colour of the agapanthuses whenever he came around._

 

“And I let him,” murmurs Albus. He never tears his eyes away from the mirror. “Merlin help me, I wanted him to.”

 

Gellert’s smile in the mirror comes as easy as it always did. If there is any darkness lurking inside it, Albus still doesn’t see it. He thinks he should, but Gellert’s smile has always been too impish and fey to be malicious. His hair falls into his eyes. Albus wonders if it still does, or if being separate has somehow changed more about Gellert than he thinks he could safely bear.

 

He knows MACUSA brought him into custody and then lost him again. He knows Gellert’s amassing followers across the world, never content to stay in Europe, and using the Muggle chaos of warfare to further his own agenda. He knows there are countless whispers of murders, of rituals, of things so dark that even Knockturn Alley has gone quiet.

 

He feels Gellert’s touch in the bones left in graveyards, the dried blood on fertile soil, the gold coins that dance across his fingers at the crossroads. He’s been following in his lover’s wake for months now. He halts when Gellert waits. He lets Gellert assert dominion through sacrifice and offers up empty prayers to the dead that land at his feet.

 

Albus is complicit every step of the way.

 

Flamel’s cautions about the mirror ring hollow in his ears as he raises his hand to the glass and traces the lines of his lover’s face. He memorises every line, every strand of hair, every shift in expression. He hungers.

 

Gellert has never been one to let him starve.

 

*****

 

The end of the world, rather fittingly, comes about on a Monday.

 

He’s been holed up in the resistance’s encampments for weeks now. There have been glimpses of Grindelwald’s most loyal in these woods, though they mingle with Muggles so readily that Albus loses track of them before long. Not for the first time, he curses the fact that Gellert threw in his lot with the worst of these Muggles.

 

 _A means to an end, surely you know this,_ mocks Gellert’s memory gently. _They will see what I wish them to see._

 

Albus wonders if Gellert saw _this_ , too.

 

He has been shamed into meeting Grindelwald’s forces on a battlefield of their own choosing. They’d have an upper hand if it was not for the many, many creatures at the beck and call of the Light. They’d have more control over the battle if they were not so damned scared of Albus’s quick wand flashes. They’d be winning, except that they seemed to be doing their best to lose all advantages they had.

 

Albus, meanwhile, has given up all pretense of belonging to the Light.

 

Picking sides is for children.

 

He’s just here to see it end.

 

Albus isn’t quite certain of the end he seeks until _he_ steps forward from beyond enemy lines. The warriors around him falter. Quail. Fall to their knees, even, in a routine they cannot help any more than Albus can shift the stones that have sunk into his gut at the sight. The world around the man acquiesces and bows to him willingly.

 

There is a feral smile on Gellert’s face that may yet demand more sacrifice.

 

“This fight is not yours,” Albus tells young men who tremble in their boots at the sight. He sweeps arches and shields around the battlefield best he can, lighting his path with flourishes of his wand that Gell always said were unnecessarily frivolous. He jabs thunder at those who seek to head him off on his way to ruin. “This is mine, alone.”

 

He sounds more confident than he feels.

 

His courage almost leaves him at the sound of his name carried forth on the wind.

 

“Albus.”

 

Gellert utters his name as easily as though he speaks of the weather. The inflection is lazy, slightly drawn on the ‘l’ in that too-familiar way, and the blink of his eyes a fraction too slow to be natural. He does not sound surprised to see him. His smile is too fond, the dip of his head too respectful, and Albus steels himself for whatever comes next.

 

“Gellert.”

 

His own voice wavers, dips in strength as he drinks in the man’s wild countenance, before settling on a hard note. He swallows the first of many questions. Stumbles on the words of the second in his head, as though his brain received a thorough shake-up from which it has not yet recovered. He comes to stand before Gellert Grindelwald and thinks, with a surprised laugh, that Gell’s finally the taller of them both.

 

The smile he’s given in turn is gone so soon that Albus almost thinks – no, _hopes_ – that he imagined it.

 

“I suppose this is some kind of end, then.” Gellert has always been good at these casual conversations. He does not shy away from truths, though he loves to wrap them in sweet-sounding lies and half-manipulations. The laugh comes easy, all glittering teeth and no malice in his gaze, but Gellert never lowers his wand. “I thought you would have come sooner, old friend.”

 

“I’d given it a thought.” He’d given it multiple. Several times over, he had stood upon the brink of Apparition. He’d always found an excuse. There was always a _next time_ , even when people were dying or falling to their knees in surrender. He considers the man a moment. Sees the boy looking back at him. Albus heaves a sigh. “I was afraid.”

 

“You still are.”

 

He wills his fingers to cease their tremble. Wills the next step forward to be more certain than all the steps he took thus far. He supposes it’s only right that Gellert still hears the trepidation that coats his tongue.He has no secrets from this man.

 

His heart’s a goddamn viper’s pit.

 

“I have come to stop you,” he says, rather stupidly. He raises his own wand and is grateful when his hand does not waver. “I cannot let you continue.”

 

The war rages around them. The Muggles, battle-hardened and world-weary, give them a wide berth. There is no Statute of Secrecy here, where magic meets the mundane so readily. There is no point in pretending they are anything other than two powerful wizards at odds with each other’s visions.

 

There is no hiding the heartbreak.

 

“I will not come quietly, old friend,” warns Gellert.

 

Albus smiles a sad smile, then. “I never imagined you would.”

 

*****

 

Nurmengard is a great deal darker than Albus imagined it would be.

 

He supposes that the Gellert who created this prison is the Gellert he only ever caught glimpses of. He chances a glance sideways. There is something dark in the man’s countenance now as they near the gates. Albus wonders if this is how Durmstrang knew him, with his wildness turned grim and his blue eyes dim and fixed on a point far beyond earthly containment. If this is what got him expelled following words and rituals that even Albus has never known all the names and uses of.

 

For the first time, Albus thinks he understands what it means to fall in love with the abyss.

 

_For The Greater Good_

 

Cold runs down his spine at the sight of the words that sprawl lazily across the top of the gate. _His_ words. _Not_ Gellert’s. Gellert had laughed the first time he’d coined the phrase. He’d laughed so wildly and for so long that Albus, red splotches marring his cheeks, had risen from the bed in a huff and made to leave.

 

Gellert’s hands had pulled him back in with apologies tumbling from lips not used to offering _sorry._

 

“Don’t tell me you are surprised,” says his companion. There are no gentle Sunday mornings between them now. No midnight crawls into each other’s bedrooms, no ways to share a heart. “I told you once that it would all be for you.”

 

“I never asked for this,” he hisses.

 

“No, I suppose you did not.” Gellert’s eyes never stray from the silver that lines the horizon beyond Nurmengard’s dark presence. His shackles sound like bells ringing in the quiet. “Yet you have it. I suppose you were not the only fearful one.”

 

“Do you still believe that all you did was..”

 

“For the greater good?” Gellert pauses. Bites his lip in thought. “Does it matter?”

 

 _Yes,_ he wants to say. _To me. It matters to me._

 

“I suppose not,” he shrugs instead.

 

Gellert laughs at that. He laughs the way he did when Albus first gave him the words that would subjugate nations and bring non-magic folk to heel. He laughs wildly, the dark forest coming alive in the timbre of his voice, and Nurmengard echoes with his cries. He falls in step with Albus again, laughing all the while, smiling as though there was a joke hiding in what was said and what was silenced.

 

With his laughter comes the madness, before long, and Albus leaves him in its thrall.

 

*****

 

“Another day, another Dark Lord.”

 

Albus yelps as his face grows suddenly, unbearably hot. He scoots back from the table on which he’s conducting one of his many experiments with divinatory tools. A touch of his wand extinguishes the flame that leaped into his beard.

 

“Gell,” he splutters, knowing the source of that voice _anywhere_ , “what in the world?”

 

“Hullo to you too, Al.”

 

Leave it to Gellert to sound so supremely unconcerned about showing up unchained, unharmed, and decidedly _not_ unhinged.

 

“ _How_?”

 

How are you here? How can you be here? How are you alive, and breathing, and close enough to touch? How many of these noxious fumes I breathed in are mind-altering? How long have you been _standing there_?

 

Albus shakes his head. Tries to clear it from the barrage of questions that keeps on invading his brain.

 

“The duel, I suppose. The spells we used.” Gellert sounds as though he’s had a great deal more time to think about it than Albus has. “We’re both mind-readers. You used your own death against me while being linked to me in my head. I suppose it did something neither of us controlled.”

 

“I had to slow you down,” mumbles Albus. He’s not proud of using a Boggart in the middle of that fight. He’d rather thought it would show Gellert something else. Something that wasn’t.. Albus. Something that wasn’t death and love all at once. He scrapes his throat. “You were too good. We were too evenly matched. Couldn’t let you win.”

 

Gellert’s teeth glitter in the light. The man’s laughter sounds saner than Albus last heard it. Warm, even, and welcoming like an old friend.

 

Albus takes another step back.

 

“Calm down, will you?” Gellert raises an eyebrow rather imperiously. “I’m here but I’m not here. Pretty certain I can’t kill you. Pretty sure other people can’t see me, either.” A pause. “My body’s at Nurmengard, still. My spirit, well.. I suppose that there are things possible between this heaven and earth that even I could not foresee.”

 

He has to sit down at that news.

 

Gellert smirks.

 

“What did you mean, another Dark Lord?” Albus makes up his mind and decides to cling to the least insane aspect of this conversation. Prays that the rest will make more sense in time. Perhaps after he’s slept? Yes. Perhaps then. “There has not been another since you.”

 

“There will be. Your student. The one who keeps trinkets that are not his and makes them into trophies.”

 

Albus would’ve laughed if he could only remember how.

 

“Tom Riddle?” he asks instead, though he already knows the answer. _Of course_ it’s going to be Riddle, cold and calculating, charming in a manner that hypnotises common men. “You came all this way to warn me about Tom?”

 

“No. Yes.”

 

Albus regards Gellert quietly. The man shifts from foot to foot under his gaze. His eyes roam over everything in the room except Albus. It’s see-through, so blatant that it startles a gasp from Albus’s lungs.

 

“You came to see me.” This is not a question. The next word, however, is. The temperature in the room drops at the sound. “Why?”

 

“Should I have a reason to want to?”

 

“Goddamn it, Gell,” mutters Albus darkly, never taking his eyes off the apparition of the man who haunts his dreams to this day, “why is everything always a flirtation with you?”

 

“The alternative, you would not like.” Gellert sounds almost chastising for a moment. Then, the man’s voice dips into a low growl. “I’m going out of my mind in this trap. Only fitting that my mind should wander and land with you, isn’t it?”

 

“You imprisoned yourself. You shouldn’t _wander_.”

 

“Well, I’m here now. Water under the bridge and all. It really is for your own–”

 

“Don’t stand there and say this is for my own benefit,” warns Albus when Gellert shows no signs of halting his speech. He rises to his feet. Walks up to Gellert with a steadier gait than he expected to have. “You’re the reason we’re in this mess.”

 

“You cast Legilimens.”

 

“You cast that wandless, wordless, Seer magic.”

 

“And thus, we have collided.”

 

“You’re in my head. This isn’t real.”

 

If he takes another step, he is lost. If he reaches out, he is gone. If he touches the man, golden white before him, he will burn brighter than his phoenix’s fire.

 

“Of course I’m in your head, Al. Why on earth should that mean this isn’t real?”

 

Albus Dumbledore collapses against Gellert Grindelwald and thinks this heart of his will yet be his ruin.

 

*****

 

It’s been years of this. Gellert is not always there. When he is, it’s always for something monumental. It’s always for something that matters, or will matter, or might matter if given the chance.

 

Albus isn’t sure what this time is.

 

His arm rests on Gellert’s waist. The moonlight streaks over their skin, all silver and molten gold flickering into white, and the cool night air makes Albus’s hairs stand on end. Gellert is not susceptible to the cold, or the warmth of the embrace.

 

He’s said this comforts him all the same, and Albus often prays it was not another lie.

 

“He will come eventually, you know.”

 

“Gell–”

 

“Hush, Al.” The man’s long hair tickles his bare arm as Gellert shifts and rolls onto his side. His blue eyes are dim in this scarce light, darker than Albus remembers them, and the set of his mouth is now far too hard to kiss. “Your student. The one who wants to surpass his master by destroying all his master holds dear. He’ll come for me. One day, when you are no longer here to see it.”

 

There’s a certainty in Gellert’s tone that Albus knows better than to argue with. There was always a bit of Seer blood in the Grindelwald line, passed down sparingly and haltingly through its most powerful scions, and Gellert’s voice lilts a little too much into the sing-song of one who _knows_. Albus used to think him mad. Used to think it was just the side-effect of Gellert experimenting with magic he should not possess, the repercussions of the great dark that had come over him at Durmstrang, the ‘blood will have blood’ thrum of something wilder still.

 

He knows better than to argue with that now.

 

He shivers even in the warmth of his bed. A chill settles at the base of his spine that he thinks will remain there until whatever his lover Sees will come to pass. There’s no warmth in this future. No relief from the guilt that lodges itself in his throat in the mornings when he wakes alone. There is no amount of running or fighting that could hold this at bay.

 

“He might not,” Albus says, all the same. Holds out hope that just this time, just this _once_ , Gellert will have Seen wrong. “He might be stopped before then.”

 

Gellert’s laugh is softer than he remembers. There’s no trace of wickedness in the curve of the lips he presses against Albus’s shoulder. The kiss is so fleeting that Albus has half a mind to think of it as stolen. “You are the best and worst of us,” murmurs Gellert, “but I never thought of you as blind.”

 

“I cannot see when I’m with you.”

 

It’s easier to confess this in the dark. Easier to say it to this figment of Gellert that’s lodged in his head, to this projection he knows is partially his own making, than it ever was to say such a thing to the man’s face. He thinks of it as the truth. Thinks that if he’d been less blind, less willing to see only what he wished to see, that somehow things would have been different. That _he_ would have been different.

 

“You make yourself hard to love,” knows Gellert, and the chaste kiss he presses to Albus’s lips is too real to be imagined. Albus grips the man’s arms in a silent plea. _Stay. Leave._ Gellert’s head comes to rest against his brow. His breath gives further heat to the blush that has risen in Albus’s cheeks. “It is your good fortune that your student will never understand love’s intricacy. He will see it as weakness.”

 

“As you do.” Albus’s mouth curves downward, disapproving. “You use it as leverage. That’s not strength, Gellert.”

 

“Not over you. _Never_ with you.” The low, feverish tone settles in Albus’s bones. His body’s flushed with want, responding to the dark before him in spite of his mind’s cautions, and he forgets all the words of the argument when Gellert’s confession spills out in the small space between Albus’s mouth and his own. “My love for you brought me to ruin. I think it brought you to yours, too. And we’re the stronger for it, aren’t we?”

 

“This isn’t strength,” he croaks out.

 

“Weakness then. Youthful folly.” Gellert’s laugh is as wild and carefree as he remembers it, now, and the next kiss as fierce as that very first time Gellert sought to claim him. “But we know all of that, and your student never will. There is a victory in that.” The Seer mingles with the lover, lilting song travelling through the curve and swirl of their tongues. “Let yourself have that victory, Albus, and the war is won.”

 

“There is no war.”

 

“Your student would yet wage it.”

 

“Don’t speak to me of Tom Riddle,” hisses Albus, then, and his hold on Gellert’s arms becomes a vice that will leave its mark on that marble-white skin. Magic crackles between them only a moment before it dies back down. A warning. Albus would’ve laughed at the familiarity of it if he did not feel so annoyed. “I know who he is. What he’ll do. I don’t need you to tell me.”

 

“No, but you need me to say that there is a path out of that darkness. A road away from what you fear you’ll have to become.”

 

“I already became it.” The chess master, the duelist, the imprisoner, the hermit. He is aware he sounds as petulant as a child. He sounds like _Ariana_ , and _that_ almost knocks his remaining breath from his lungs. “I had to, for you. To stop you.”

 

“Oh, Albus,” sighs Gellert, sounding tired and amused all at once, “do I look like a man who didn’t _want_ you to stop him?”

 

These are the moments, Albus contemplates _after_ , on which he is certain he invited the devil into his bed.

 

*****

 

Sirius Black’s mad laughter still echoes in his ears as he shuts the door to his office and sinks down to the floor.

 

“I’m not in the mood,” he warns out loud, not caring how mad he may sound to all the portraits in the room. “Not after this.”

 

“I imagine he sounded like me, when you delivered me to Nurmengard.”

 

“He did not stop laughing. Neither did you.” He feels so much older than his years. He feels defeated even in this victory. “Why the laughter? I’ve often wondered.”

 

“You wouldn’t understand.”

 

Albus raises his eyes slowly. He can’t help the way they harden into steel at the sight of Gellert sitting atop his desk. “Try me,” he challenges. “Tell me why.”

 

“It does not do you any good to know.”

 

Gellert slips off the desk. Pads over to where Albus is seated and sinks down to his knees before him. There is something in his blue eyes that can almost be called loss, though it’s gone again so soon that Albus doesn’t dare give deeper meaning to it.

 

“Can you blame me?” His voice is soft. So soft he thinks Gellert needs to strain to catch it. “I did not see this. Of all possible outcomes, this wasn’t..”

 

“I saw it. Once. The boy named after constellations was not who the world thinks he was. I don’t know if you’re seeing it right, Al.”

 

“Can _you_ see?”

 

“Nurmengard is a prison, still,” admonishes Gellert gently. Too gently. Albus’s eyes sting with tears. “The most I can advise is an open mind. I cannot see beyond that.”

 

“Then what good are you?”

 

Albus regrets the words as soon as they have twisted out of his mouth. Gellert reels back as if he’s been backhanded across the face. Then, his face splits into a colder smile than Albus has ever seen on him. It knocks his remaining breath from his lungs.

 

“ _There_ is all I love,” says the erstwhile Dark Lord, eyes aglow with hurt and affection both, “and all that I now must leave. For your sake, Albus.”

 

The war is won. The victory hollow.

 

Sandalwood and thunder follow in Albus’s wake for the next five days.

 

*****

 

It’s thunder that summons his lover again, in the end.

 

Albus watches the crackle of it travel across the night sky with a great deal more interest than he’s ever had in the weather before. “Do you see this at Nurmengard?” he asks, not bothering to turn around and welcome his visitor. “All this beauty?”

 

“Tonight, yes.” The answer is cautious, laced with uncertainty. “It brought me to you.”

 

Albus smiles at that. “You flatter me, old man,” he chides. Knows the comment to be a flirtation only Gellert Grindelwald would dare utter so readily. “I would apologise, but..”

 

“Pfah.” Gellert dismisses the offer, as Albus expected he would. “That, too, is water under a very long bridge.” A pause. “The mirror, Al?”

 

He turns around at that. Observes the man who now looks rather like an old lion, grizzled and fierce within lean limbs and sharp eyes. There is a pause in the wizard’s steps as he edges closer to the damned, dratted Mirror of Erised. Old age has not been kind to Gellert.

 

Old age is kind to no one.

 

“What of the mirror, Gell?” he responds, when it is clear that the wizard is not going to look at him. He studiously avoids looking at the mirror itself. Flamel had made him look when he went to retrieve the Stone. His admission, now, is soft. “It’s still the same as it ever was.”

 

“Do you still see me?”

 

“I’ve never stopped seeing you.” Sometimes, he thinks he goes mad with it. The summer months at Hogwarts are the hardest. He hears Gellert’s laugh carry on the breeze that sets over the lake in the late evenings. Sees his easy smile in the glint of sunlight and in the stars that freckle the clear sky’s countenance. Feels his warmth wrap around him tighter than any blanket and heavier than the humidity that coats the very top of the Astronomy Tower. “You are, as you will always be, in my head.”

 

“And in the mirror?”

 

Gellert looks strangely hungry. His gaze rests on the Mirror of Erised as though he knows precisely which demons it can call forth. There is starvation in his gaunt cheeks, his brittle bones, his every move. Albus wonders for a moment what Nurmengard feeds him, before he recalls that this prison siphons away all life if one surrenders to it only a moment.

 

He knows Gellert surrenders to it every night in dreams.

 

“It shows me socks,” he murmurs, eyes trained on the mirror’s frame rather than on its reflective surface. “That’s what I told Harry.”

 

“It shows Ariana, then.”

 

“Don’t speak her name!”

 

Albus doesn’t mean to thunder it so loudly that the wind outside the room hushes and dies down at the sound. He doesn’t mean for his nails to dig into the palms of his hands so strongly that they draw blood. He doesn’t mean for the torches on the walls to flare up so dangerously that they might yet lick the curtains with their flames. His magic becomes a sharp twang on his tongue, a gesture that can hurt and heal in his hands, an unforgivable force meeting that same immovable object once more.

 

“It wasn’t you, you know,” says Gellert, softly, when Albus exhales a breath and unfurls his fists. “I suppose it was me, though that was the one death I would never have intended. Perhaps the only one I can regret, at that. I suppose it was her, too. Obscurial to her last. I suppose it was all of us, together, and then it was none of us.”

 

“You’re not making sense.” Albus huffs. His eyes catch on the mirror’s edge. His vision blurs. The room becomes so warm that he can’t breathe right. “She’s dead. There must be _someone_ to blame for that.”

 

“It’s easiest for you if it’s me.”

 

The admission is soft. Albus closes his eyes.

 

When he opens his eyes again, Gellert has moved to stand in front of the mirror entirely. He is almost nose-to-nose with it. He regards the reflection within so sternly that Albus almost laughs. He’s not quite certain what Gellert sees in it, if he can see anything at all. They have only figured their connection out to this point. Neither one has dared stretch it to its limits. There is no term for their condition. There is no name for two Legilimens being tied together in their minds after a hasty spell, a broken ritual, and a lifetime of regret.

 

In this, as in all other things, they are unique.

 

“It’s hardest for me if it’s you,” he says, then, and watches Gellert’s face close itself off to him. “Myself, I can blame. You, I never could.”

 

“Sentimental.”

 

“Honest.”

 

Gellert’s lip curls. “Foolish.”

 

Albus will allow him that. “Perhaps.”

 

“This mirror, Al.. I show not your face but your heart’s desire?”

 

“So it says.”

 

“I just see us.” Gellert almost sounds confounded. “Us, in this room.”

 

“Maybe it doesn’t work.” Albus hedges out the words carefully. “You’re only ever half here, after all. It might not be the same.”

 

Gellert’s laugh is hollow. “It is. I see her, you know. In the background, near that door over there. Alive. That’s how I know it’s.. It _works_.”

 

“I just see you,” Albus admits, ashamed. “It’s only ever you.”

 

“She’s not your burden to carry. That one is mine alone.”

 

“She’s my sister.” His voice is sharp. “My responsibility.”

 

“And my downfall, in the end.” He finds it hard to argue with Gellert when his tone hardens. Finds it even harder when Gellert merely changes the subject. Easy like talking about the weather. Gellert can still change the course of history with a well-placed word. “I trust that you will use this mirror to counter that farce of a Dark Lord, then?”

 

Albus inclines his head.

 

Gellert’s voice has never echoed louder or more viciously in his skull than it does now.

 

“Good.”

 

*****

 

He supposes it’s only right that Gellert only shows himself now, at the end of all things. He sits alone at the window. If he turns his head one way, he can see the ring that finally bested him sitting atop his desk. The symbol on the stone mocks him. If he turns his head the other way, he’s certain he will see Gellert. Exasperated, alive, and understanding.

 

It’s tempting to turn his head.

 

Albus sits and stares at the lightning that flashes across the sky instead.

 

“You’ve found a Hallow.”

 

“The third. The last.” Master of Death, he will never be. “A fool’s errand.”

 

“You’d hoped to see her. Your sister.”

 

Albus closes his eyes. Wonders why, after all these years, he still punishes himself by opening up to Gellert. Why the man’s few well-chosen words have the power to destroy him in ways that Tom Riddle could never even dream of. He supposes it’s nice to not have to explain how he wound up with a withered hand and a slow-acting curse set to claim his life before the year is up. It’s considerably less nice to have Gellert Grindelwald adopt an ‘I told you so’-tone that dances close to an admonition.

 

Still, he tries to find reason for his current predicament.

 

“I dropped the stone when the curse acted. If I’d held on..”

 

“If you’d held on to that stone today, Albus, I should have killed you on the battlefield all those years ago instead. It would have been a greater mercy than what your student had devised for you.”

 

He hates it when Gellert slips into a matter-of-fact statement he cannot refute. Gell had been good at that as a boy already. He’d been manipulative, spiteful, and vindictive – but he’d also been eerily good at finding reason for the madness, and at giving it new life in Albus’s mind. His voice silver as a Seer’s, his eyes too bright, and Albus bows his head before he sees anything more to love.

 

“Our hours are numbered. Our names already written on our gravestones.” Only Gellert could make death sound like such a casual affair. “You will die, as will I, before the war ends.”

 

“The next great adventure,” he murmurs. “I rather wish we’d had more time.”

 

Gellert’s hand is wrinkled with age. It lands on his newly cursed hand, more gentle than it has a right to be, softer than a murderer’s hands should feel. “Not all of us know the time we are given, Al. I always have. I saw my own end a hundred times over since I met you.” Albus knows the torture it brought. The night terrors. The dark gleam in Gellert’s eyes and the grip on his hands that tightened to the point of being painful. _Birth contractions_ , Gellert had gasped one time. Albus hadn’t known what that meant, then. He thinks he does, now. He supposes Gellert’s next words confirm that much. “Albus. You know your time now, too. Make use of it.”

 

“There is so much left to do.”

 

“And you will do all of it.” His lover’s tone brooks no argument, even when it turns into a gentle mockery of his good naming and standing. “You’re Albus Dumbledore, Supreme Mugwump, after all.”

 

He sighs. Rests his good hand atop Gellert’s. Feels so much older than his many, many years. “I think I would, for this once, settle for being just Al.”

 

“You should’ve settled for that years ago, before they began to give you titles and glory.” That matter-of-fact tone again. Gellert’s fingers interlace with his own briefly before squeezing and letting go. The man’s breath rests hot on his cheek. “You were always just Al to me. Even when you refused to look me in the eye, even when we fought, even at my worst. You were there. You saw me.” Gellert’s tone is low, feverish. “And I.. I will die regretting what I made of us.”

 

Albus turns his head, then, and his mouth brushes over wet skin. Salt coats his lips. The breath Gellert lets out is shuddering, keening like that of a wounded animal, before it steadies. The words he wanted to say die in his throat at the sound. He presses his lips to Gellert’s mouth instead. Thinks that maybe he can say what he means to through sharing his breath, his being, just one more time.

 

_I don’t regret what you made of us. What I let us become. Merlin help me, Gell, I can’t. I refuse to._

 

Gellert’s tears scare him more than the curse ever will.

 

 

*****

 

 

Death still manages to surprise him.

 

For the longest time, he thinks that the white world that surrounds him is all there is of living _after_. He can make out shapes in the mist. Buildings from his youth, figures that seem familiar, animals he bowed to and encountered throughout many a year. His mind is at peace here. He barely remembers war, strife, decay. He barely recalls his own name.

 

Harry Potter shows up, and the world around him _changes_.

 

He remembers all the plans now. Recalls every single one of his machinations that led this young man to stand before him now. The world solidifies into a too-white, too-pristine version of King’s Cross. He can spot distant trains moving into the station and coming to rest next to their platforms. He almost sheds a tear when he realises he can look Harry in the eye again without needing to be concerned about his former student staring back at him. Love won the first war. A different love has won this last.

 

He speaks of Gellert with _this_ student. Tom Riddle guessed at it, sought to twist it, failed to understand it. Harry Potter only listens. To Albus, his own words all sound like justifications and his grief over his sister twists out into the loss of his one true equal. He sounds fallible to this student for the first time, he knows, and perhaps this is his penance for seeking to master Death and usher this world into his version of the Greater Good.

 

Harry, brave and resilient, turns away from Death better than Albus and Gellert ever could.

 

“I was right about the boy, I see,” says a low voice behind him just as Harry Potter’s form retreats into the mist. “He is your child as he is mine.”

 

“Gell–”

 

“Come now, Albus. You asked the Hat that night seven years ago, did you not? The boy, though Gryffindor, would have done rather well in Slytherin.” Amusement laces Gellert Grindelwald’s voice. “We could not have raised a better leader of the Wizarding World if we had tried, old friend.”

 

“Harry does not want to lead.”

 

“And yet, he will never be content to follow.”

 

Albus laughs, then, and feels lighter for it. “Is there anything you were ever _not_ right about?”

 

“Subjugation of Muggles, Wizarding supremacy, woollen socks,” summarises Gellert rather succinctly. “I was a fool most my life, Al.”

 

Albus reaches for him, then, and does so blindly. Gellert’s hand is warm. If he focuses enough, he can feel all the dips and movements within its touch. He curls his little finger around Gellert’s little finger and holds on.

 

“Do you remember, the first time we did this? I thought you were pinky-promising me something.” Gellert laughs softly at the memory. “It took me too long to recognise you wanted to hold my hand, but were too shy to.”

 

“Well, you can say I’ve been a fool most my life, too,” confesses Albus.

 

Gellert looks old and young all at once when he finally dares glance sideways. The slightly wicked smile has never changed in all these long years. The eyes, too, are still bright with knowing. Albus feels the years slip away from him the longer he looks at Gellert. There is no more war. No more chessboard to control.

 

There’s just them. An _us_.

 

Their fingers interlace.

 

“Oh, love,” the man whispers.

 

“Oh, great wonder of it all,” he whispers back.

 

They laugh.


End file.
